The issue of the southern border is still out there.
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| Jeff Merkley |
Democrats talk of compassion and family separation. That is one side of the issue.
There is also the emotional issue of border sovereignty, adverse possession, and disrespect. That is Trump's side.
Senator Jeff Merkley was in Medford, Oregon on Friday to meet with business and community leaders about the southern border problem. He heard two messages. One, from a successful builder who had immigrated from El Salvador, was a policy of compassion. Those immigrants are real people, escaping real problems.
The Democratic candidates for president are speaking to that sentiment.
Merkley also heard from people in the agricultural and construction industries. The guest worker programs are too slow and inflexible. Pears are rotting on the trees. Hemp buds are growing mold. Wages have gone up to $20/hour but the problem isn't that the wages are too high; it is that workers cannot be found at any price.
Compassion and jobs: two good reasons why immigration reform should be easy, right? No. In fact, it is nearly impossible.
Adverse possession. It leaves out the element Trump used to win election: border sovereignty and the emotions it stimulates.
By chance this same week I heard a presentation by Joe Kellerman, a Medford, Oregon attorney, who deals with the issue of adverse possession. Adverse possession, I heard him say, is an arena fraught with deep seated emotions by both sides of a boundary dispute. Real estate boundaries, he said, create irrational, but very real, attachments. Clients fight and run up legal expenses over land they cannot use and that has negligible monetary value.
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| Joe Kellerman: roguelaw.com |
In a boundary dispute of adverse possession, someone who is using property becomes attached to it and experiences a feeling of ownership. Perhaps they incorrectly thought it was theirs. Perhaps it was used by them because it was convenient and over time they bonded to it. In any case, they become emotionally attached. It is theirs.
The person on the other side of the dispute with titular ownership of the land, experiences the adverse possession claim as a theft, a loss, and a high-handed sign of disrespect. It's a slap in the face.
The result, Kellerman said, can be a fight driven not by rational value but by the emotional response to dispossession and insult.
Trump is playing to the emotion of the landowner, facing a claim of "adverse possession" by immigrants. It isn't that the undocumented people don't have useful work to do or that they don't contribute to the life and economy of the US, because they do. It is that they just waltzed in and make claims. They are un-invited guests and scofflaws.
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| Is it on the property line? |
What should Democrats do?
Recognize that emotion is out there and work with it.
Democrats can embrace border security as the mechanism for allowing more immigration. Trump has made border security a vehicle for xenophobic messages but Democrats can reverse that polarity by arguing for border security as a way to increase immigration for those good people. It need not be solely a matter of "soft" compassion, although it certainly can be that. It is also a matter of jobs and a strong economy.
Crops are rotting in the fields.
3 comments:
We should stop calling it immigration and tell it like it is. This migration.
movement of people to a new area or country in order to find work or better living conditions.
Humans are no different from any other species on the planet in this regard.
Immigration acknowledges this by creating a legal framework to accommodate migrants.
America was settled by Europeans who migrated for the same reasons; economic, religious, political, and that continues to this day. As long as there is some hope of a better life this society will attract those who have the courage and fortitude to make the journey.
We should welcome them. We need them. Instead Regressives would rather turn the country into a place no one would want to come. No migration problems in Russia, China and North Korea.
We should also acknowledge that Latin America, due in a large extent to climate change, is increasingly becoming uninhabitable which is one of the drivers of migration. It's not going to get any better until the industrialized World starts taking steps to decrease CO2 emissions. The United States could lead this effort to combat an existential threat that is far greater than migration.
I think you, Peter, perhaps due to excessive listening to trump, are greatly oversimplifying the adverse possession issue. Each state makes their own adverse possession laws, and I think most of them are complicated enough that it’s difficult to win a case, depending a lot on the individual situations. I can’t imagine many people arriving from Mexico, or other foreign country, having the resources to win an adverse possession lawsuit. I have-regrettably-beeen involved in two of them. Won the one in California, doing all the legal research myself, and the aggressor against me here in Josephine County was more bark than bite, and he gave up without much real effort.
Malcolm, thanks for your comment. It means I failed to communicate my point. Of course undocumented people do not have an actual adverse possession case against the USA. I was making the point about the feelings of the title holder against neighbors pressing the case that they have gained ownership by right of possession. I am saying that the emotion of invasion and anger at the presumption and temerity of the claimant is a primal one. That same feeling may be part of what animates the Trump base’s opposition to immigration.
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